Kate Forsyth writes about a much-loved childhood classic:
I
first read Nicholas Stuart Gray’s novel The
Stone Cage when I was about eleven. It was an utter revelation to me.
The Stone Cage is a retelling of the
Rapunzel fairy tale, told from the point of view of the witch’s cat. It was the
first fairy tale retelling I had ever read, and I remember being amazed that a
writer could take an old, well-known story and turn it into something utterly
new and surprising.
I
was also utterly enchanted by the story itself, and particularly by the
characters of Tomlyn the cat, and Marshall, the witch’s raven. One was sleek,
self-assured, coolly amused, and tantalised by the bewitching power of sorcery.
The other was hunched and tattered and miserable, with a great heart.
What
I remember most about The Stone Cage
was the absolute assurance of the voice. It sounded exactly how I imagined a
cat would speak:
‘My name is Tomlyn. I am very beautiful. Marshall says I am
spiteful and wicked and a barbarian to boot. He’s jealous of my thick grey fur,
my white chin and breast, and the snowy end of my tail. I suppose he can’t help
being envious, the great rusty-black thing! He’s got a big, blunt beak, and stubby
wings, and tiny little eyes... He’s old and stupid and a coward; with an
endless flow of long words that he can’t possibly understand.’
I
had always been fascinated by ‘Rapunzel’, and reading The Stone Cage made me want to write my own retelling of the tale.
I even had a go at it, when I was in my mid-teens. And, yes, my story had a cat
in it too. Many years later, I did write my own retelling of the tale, though
my novel Bitter Greens is very, very
different.
Nicholas Stuart Gray was born on 23 October 1922, in Scotland. From a young age, he
made up stories and plays to amuse his brothers and sisters, and to try and
escape his unhappy childhood. He described his mother as ‘beautiful and
terrifying’.‘She was a
megalomaniac,’ he said in an interview in 1973. ‘We grew up terribly unsure of
ourselves and doubtful of other people, always prepared to be cut down … We
were always ugly, stupid, gullible, useless people in her eyes.’
Gray admitted that the
character of the witch in his play The
Wrong Side of the Moon (1966) is ‘almost a biography’ of his mother and I
wonder if she influenced the character of the witch in The Stone Cage, who was utterly egocentric and had no feelings of
remorse for any of her actions. ‘The sad
thing about people like (my mother) is they are completely alone,’ Gray said in the same interview.
Gray left home at the age of
fifteen, finding work as an actor and stage manager. His first play was
produced before he was twenty years old, and he turned to writing for children
in 1949 after seeing a hundred or more children queuing up for the cinema and
wondering why there was no comparable entertainment for them in the theatre. He
wrote the play Beauty and the Beast as
a result, and it was shown at the
Mercury Theatre in London in 1950.
Gray wanted,
he said, ‘to give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough.
They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see
frightful things there. But they’re not being given a world to escape to … the world of the
imagination. Children must have an
escape line somewhere.’
His first novel, Over the Hills to Fabylon, was
published in 1954. It is about a city that can fly away across the
mountains any time the king feels his home is in danger.
Other important works include The Seventh Swan, which tells what happened to the boy left with one swan wing instead of an arm; Down
in the Cellar, an eerie story of a
family of children who find a gateway to another world in their basement; Grimbold's
Other World, about a black cat that teaches a boy about the world of
the night; The Apple Stone, which
tells of the adventures of a family of children who find a magic stone, and, of
course, The Stone Cage, published 50 years ago this year.
Gray’s story line follows the
basic plot of the well-known Grimm fairy tale, which had been translated into
English in 1882 by Lucy Crane. Her translation was based upon the 1857 edition
of the Grimm’s Kinder-und-Hausmärchen,
in which the character of Rapunzel is at its most passive and childlike. There
is no mention of any sex, or pregnancy, or birth of twins in that tale, and
Rapunzel betrays herself to the witch (rather stupidly), by complaining how
much heavier she is to pull up than the prince.
Within the narrow
confines of that tale, Gray created a story that celebrates the redemptive
power of love. Tomlyn the cat and Marshall the raven – natural enemies and
rivals for the witch’s rare expressions of affection – are united in their
desire to save Rapunzel. They protect her from the witch, an old, ugly and malicious woman who craves
power.
The story begins when the witch tricks a
woodcutter into giving up his newborn daughter. He asks her what she intends to
do with the baby. ‘Mother Gothel answered the man’s question in a small and
faraway voice: “I will teach her my craft. Teach her to be the greatest and
wickedest witch in all the world.”’
However, her plans are thwarted when
Tomlyn and Marshall lay a spell on the little girl so that she was unable to
work magic. Rapunzel grows to maturity,
frustrating and angering the witch in her inability to remember even the
simplest of spells.
Then the two conspirators bring a young
man to the witch’s garden in the hope he would rescue Rapunzel, but unwittingly
she betrays him and he is cast down from the tower and blinded. Again, the cat
and the raven work to bring Rapunzel and the prince together again, even though
Rapunzel has been banished to the dark side of the moon.
In the final confrontation, the raven
tells the witch he no longer fears her. Rapunzel agrees, ‘very clearly and
gently:
‘I’m not afraid of Mother Gothel,
either.’
‘The
witch gave a shrill cry … “You must fear me! You must! Sorcery can only thrive
on fear.’
Rapunzel’s
courage – and the bravery of her animal friends – together overcome the witch,
who is transformed by the raven’s magic into a bare and lifeless-looking tree.
There she must stay, ‘dead and dried, till a heart may grow inside.’
Rapunzel and her
prince return to the human world, but the raven and the cat stay with the witch
on the dark side of the moon, to look after her until she returns to being
human. In the final
scene, Tomlyn the cat pours a few drops of water on the tree’s roots, and a
small, green leaf uncurls from a bare twig. In this way, Nicholas Stuart Grey
shows how the animals’ faithfulness and compassion to the witch, despite her
wickedness, hold out the hope of her redemption.
Gray’s dramatic
training shows in the swift, graceful pace, and the quick, vivid character
sketches – not a word is ever wasted. The dialogue is brilliantly done, being
clever, witty and poignant in turns. Tomlyn the witch’s cat steals every scene.
He speaks and acts and thinks just like a cat should, and I was not at all
surprised to discover that Gray is most probably the only person ever to write
a biography of his own cats (The Boys,1968). I
also have a deep affection for Marshall the raven, and sympathise with his
yearning to read, and his longing to love and be loved.
Haunting,
whimsical, funny and heart-breaking, The
Stone Cage is one of the most beautiful and profound books ever written for
children. At its heart, The Stone Cage tells us that love, compassion and courage
will win out over hatred, cruelty and cowardice, and that is a lesson that
cannot be taught often enough.
All quotes from The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of
Children’s Literature, 1973
Kate Forsyth's adult fantasy 'Bitter Greens', based on the fairytale 'Rapunzel', is published in the UK by Allison & Busby. Kate is the bestselling author of more than twenty books,
ranging from picture books to poetry to novels for both children and
adults. She has won numerous awards and been published in fourteen
countries around the world. She lives by the sea in
Sydney with her husband, three children, a rambunctious Rhodesian
Ridgeback, a bad-tempered black cat, and many thousands of books. Her new novel, 'The Wild Girl', about the love affair between Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild, is to be published in the UK in 2013, and you can visit her website at
www.kateforsyth.com.au
